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What Is Real On YouTube?
An anonymous reader writes, "The popularity of user-generated video sites like YouTube has given rise to deceptive videos created for self-promotion, advertising, or even smearing rival brands. This latter format, dubbed the 'smear video,' depicts a rival brand's product exhibiting fictitious faults. One example is the 21-second YouTube video entitled 'Samsung handset, easy to break at one try!', which shows a smiling woman easily snapping the new Samsung Ultra Edition mobile phone in half. Samsung says the phone was rigged to snap and the video has now been removed from the site. The article also accuses those who created the now infamous Lonelygirl15 YouTube videos of 'deception for profit. Misrepresenting commercials as independent user-generated content, actors as members of the public, and fiction as fact.' Will user-generated video sites increasingly confront visitors with the disturbing possibility that the video they're watching is not a home video at all, but a sophisticated ad campaign?"
There's a lot of noise there. Kraft, last I checked, doesn't make cigarettes.
Which is exactly why I said to look at the share price BEFORE they purchased Kraft and to compare it to the broader markets which lowers the noise floor substantially.
My interpretation of these events is that PM saw the writing out of the wall and started insulating itself from the increasingly less-profitable, more-exposed-to-liability tobacco industry by diversifying.
Of course they did. My point was that their acquiescence to those labeling and restricted advertising laws back in 1969 did not hurt business because they outperformed the market by a substantial margin for close to 20 years. They did not lose business, they did not just maintain business, they didn't even just keep up with the rest of big business, they grew substantially faster than the average - purely from tobacco sales. Furthermore, ALL legal liability for the effects of their products was avoided during that period too due in part to the warning labels being an excuse that smokers were fully informed of the risks.
If you want to pooh-pooh such clear-cut results, then you are just playing ostrich.
I just don't buy it.
And that's exactly why they continue to get away with it.
The list is too long: OSHA, emissions standards, environmental laws, it just goes on
As if I have time to run down every one of your items, how about you open your eyes and do the research yourself? Its your "hand-waving" away of straightforward results that is contradiction to occam's razor. Big Money dominates US federal law making and has done so blatantly since at least WWII. Follow the money, it ain't hard to do.
I will say that one of your examples, emissions standards, work the same way that safety standards do - ever wonder why SUVs don't have the same requirements that small cars do? That they have been almost unregulated? Because until just recently, the only large scale manufacturers of SUVs were American and there was no risk of losing marketshare to foreign manufacturers as there obviously was with small cars. Follow the money.